Sunday, June 30, 2013

Good Bye, Farewell and New Beginnings

In March Google announced that by 1st of July Google Reader will cease to exist. I am sad to say this, but after half a decade so will NewsRob - as we know it today.

My day job and my health don't really allow me to spend enough time on NewsRob to keep it going forward. Because I didn't want to let the NewsRob community down for some time now I fooled myself into believing that there is a practical way to keep things going forward, but this is just not the case and you and I have to acknowledge that. Please accept my apologies for the inconvenience it causes you. 
And thank you for staying with me and NewsRob for so long. I know a few users by name who used NewsRob since the beginning of 2009 until now and we meanwhile know each other on many different levels. 

So alongside Google Reader the name NewsRob will disappear, as will the apps on Google Play. A little later this blog and the mailing lists will go away too, but I will keep them open for now as point to coordinate follow up activities.

However after unpublishing the app and letting go of the NewsRob name, something new and more exciting may be around the corner. 

I published the source code under the MIT open source license. At some point a new RSS reader may emerge as a whole. Or some features will surface again in other RSS readers. A likely candidate for this would be the offline capabilities, which are pretty well encapsulated.

In the same way that Google pulling out of the RSS reader market may likely turn out to be a blessing in disguise, so will me letting go of the code that was NewsRob hopefully result in other people taking over. People who will give it the attention that it deserves and that I can't devote at this point in time. 
I am really looking forward to this, as I haven't found a good replacement for my own news needs yet ;)

Travis already works on an integration of NewsBlur and published a functional beta. He agreed that his contribution is also part of the code repository I linked too.


If you want to have a look around what else is happening in the RSS arena, you may find this article useful as a starting point.